Cheesecake A Cut Above The Rest

April 14, 1985|By Charlyne Varkonyi, Food Editor

Cheesecakes by Micali are good enough to serve at an elegant dinner party and no one needs to know you didn`t bake them yourself. It is rare when a commercial bakery can produce such high-quality cheesecake with creamy texture and natural flavor. Too often commercial cheesecakes are so dry that the buyer could swear the main ingredient was cardboard.

For those who love the loose texture only a mixture of sour cream and cream cheese can produce, there`s none better than the products of this 3- month-old shop tucked next to the Haagen-Dazs ice cream store in The Galleria, Fort Lauderdale.

But, aside from the flavor, consumers are buying a family legacy. The idea germinated seven years ago when John and Babe Micali moved to Pompano Beach from Englewood Cliffs, N.J. The Micalis sold their chain-link fence business and moved south so John could recover from a heart attack.

``He was bored and felt useless,`` Babe Micali says. ``I always baked but he had never set foot in a kitchen. He said, `Teach me how to bake a cheesecake.` And as a joke a friend got him two customers. Soon he was making four to six a week and then he got a few more customers.``

John ran his cheesecake business from his home kitchen for a year and then suffered a massive heart attack and had to stop. He died in 1983. That`s when their daughter, Susan, and her then-fiance, Tim Hill, took over the family business. The couple started making 25 cheesecakes a week and now produce 150 to 200 cheesecakes a week for 55 to 60 restaurants from their bakery on Dixie Highway between Atlantic Boulevard and Copans Road in Pompano Beach. Sales vary because some restaurants order every few weeks.

``I was in college ready to go to law school when my lawyer advised me to go into the cheesecake business,`` Hill says.

Hill couldn`t cook when he went into the business and says even now he can make only the three products they sell -- cheesecake, chocolate mousse pie and key lime pie.

He relies on instinct and palate. And that instinct is four-star. He has taken a classic sour cream and cream cheese recipe and added flavorings impossible for the home cook to mimic. The ingredients are all natural, with no artificial flavorings or preservatives.

He uses passion fruit flavoring from the Philippines and puts fresh sliced kiwifruit on top. He uses compound vanillin, not vanilla extract. The flavoring for his rum raisin cheesecake costs $85 a gallon and the per cake flavoring costs equals the batter cost in a 10-inch cake. The chocolate comes from Holland.

Everything I tasted was top-drawer, from the chocolate mousse cake with the proper air-hole filled texture and chocolate cookie crust to the Key lime pie, creamier than usual without the irritating tartness characteristic of many of its counterparts.

The rum-raisin cheesecake has the potent rum flavor that Haagan-Dazs rum- raisin ice cream has lost. Another surefire winner is the chocolate swirl -- with the Keebler chocolate cookie crust and a mild but not overwhelming chocolate flavor.

Prices are reasonable for the value and Hill admits the profit margin is considerably less than the typical bakery profit of three times the ingredient cost. The 6-inch plain cheesecake is $5 and the specialty is $7. The 8-inch plain is $8 and the specialty is $10. The 10-inch plain is $17 and the specialty is $20. The key lime pie is $7 and the chocolate mousse pie is $7. Slices are $1.50 each.

Hill sums up his philosophy: ``We use the best sour cream. Everything we buy is the best. We do it all first class with ingredients the home cook couldn`t duplicate.``